Abstract:The contradiction between grazing and vegetation resource protection in wild fruit forest area has always been the core issue in the development of local animal husbandry. The objective and comprehensive evaluation of grazing intensity of wild fruit forests are of great significance to correctly understand the contradiction between forest and grazing and to formulate a scientific and reasonable grazing system. The current research mainly focuses on the effects of wild fruit forests grazing on vegetation community characteristics and species diversity. However, the attention of wild fruit forest grazing activities and the quantitative methods of grazing intensity are still unclear. This study took six typical grazing districts of wild fruit forests in Xinjiang as experimental sites, analyzed and compared the composition structure, growth characteristics, species diversity and grazing-path characteristics of herb communities in each grazing district, screened out the dominant factors for evaluating grazing disturbance intensity, and quantitatively evaluated the grazing disturbance intensity. The results showed that the number of species in Xinghuagou was the largest and Gramineae species were the dominant species. However, the herb density of Mohuergou was 1.26% higher than that of Xinghuagou. There were significant differences in species diversity among grazing districts. Compared with other grazing districts, the Shannon-Wiener and Simpson index of Mohuergou were the highest, which were 1.92 and 0.84, respectively, while the Pielou index of Wudubulakegou was the highest. In terms of the characteristics of grazing-path, the grazing-path density in the Yilegedaigou was significantly higher than that in the Piliqinggou, which was 19.23% and 14.77%, respectively, while grazing-path width in the Xinghuagou was significantly larger than that in the Daxigou. In the distribution pattern of grazing-path, except for Piliqinggou, other grazing districts were evenly distributed. The correlation analysis showed that there was a good correlation between the structural characteristics of herbaceous community, the level of species diversity and the characteristics of grazing-path. The principal component analysis of the 12 indicators screened the herbaceous community coverage, biomass, Shannon-Wiener index, Simpson index, grazing-path density, and Morisita index could be used as the dominant factor to evaluate the intensity of grazing interference. According to the grazing pressure index, Xinghuagou and Mohuergou were judged to be light and intermediate disturbance, while Daxigou, Yilegedaigou, Wudubulakegou and Piliqinggou were severe or extreme disturbance. The results indicated that the wild fruit forest in Xinjiang was seriously disturbed by grazing, and it was urgent to optimize or formulate a scientific grazing system to maintain the sustainable development of wild fruit forest.